Shopping For A Digital Press: Lessons Learned

We've spent the last two months shopping for a new digital press. These are the lessons we've learned through the process of shopping for presses.

First a little about us. This will be our 3rd press. We run mostly card stock and all full color. Quality is more important than speed, especially since most of our process is done in finishing, and most of the finishing work is slower than the printers.

One of the things we were looking to add with this new press is the ability to deal with lots of new substrates. Most important is textured stocks, with a secondary focus on foil stocks. For these specialty stocks what we've found is that you either need to go with a printer that is designed specifically for a particular specialty stock, or you need to go with something expensive like an Indigo. For example, the Ricoh 5100 does a marvelous job on linen and other textured stocks.

Here's what we've found as we started talking to the various companies about their products.

Xerox
Another thing we've looked for is responsiveness. How quickly can we get someone on the phone? A remarkable number of dealers don't seem to want our money, because we don't get calls back. This has been especially true of Xerox. The only Xerox dealer who called us back was one selling low-end machines. We have calls into others, including Xerox corporate. In fact, I've left voicemails 3 times with Xerox corporate, and filled out the online form on their web site, and have yet to receive one phone call or email after four weeks of waiting.

HP Indigo
Everyone seems to think pretty highly of HP Indigo, so our audit wouldn't be complete without it despite the fact that our click volume is far too small to make that sustainable. We looked at their smallest press. It is the most expensive machine we've looked at, but also had the best image quality. However, it is certainly not a green button machine, so isn't really a good fit for our current staff. They quoted us 8 cents per click, $250,000 for the machine, and a number of additional service fees. Also, their print area was the smallest of all the printers we looked at, and the gripper left bent edges on the sheet which would require trimming before some of our finishing equipment would receive it without jamming.

Ricoh c901 GA+
Ricoh had the best demonstration and most responsive sales staff out of everyone we talked to. The image quality was not as good as the Canon, but was very good. The Ricoh also seemed to have the best front-back registration other than the Indigo. The 901 did a fair, but not great job with the linen stock, and couldn't handle the foil at all, it kept jamming. That said, they showed us the 5100, which does a remarkable job on linen, almost as good as the Indigo. Ricoh was the only one to give us a 2 hour guarantee on technician responsiveness. They quoted us $2600/mo for a lease on both the 5100 and 901, with a 4.5 cent cost on color clicks. They also locked their click cost in for 5 years.

Canon ImagePress C6011
The Canon has excellent image quality, about the same as Konica. It doesn't have as good of registration as Ricoh, and I know from experience that maintaining consistent color on Canon's is really tough. It does a fair job with the linen stock, although not quite as good as the Ricoh 901. It handles foil remarkably well, although the toner scratches right off. They guaranteed "same day" service provided the call was in before 1pm, so that's not nearly as good as Ricoh. The quoted us $2,000/mo plus 4.6 cents per click, and a 10% inflation of the per click charge per year.

Konica Minolta Bizhub C7000/8000
We have not yet had our demo of the KM machine, but I wanted to bring them up anyway. They were the fastest to call us back, which is a huge plus in my book. In addition, they were also the only ones to bring up that they had a color specialist on staff in our area who will work with us to ensure consistent color. Now we of course asked that of the other companies (some did some didn't), but Konica is the only one who offered without asking. To me that means they were the only ones really paying attention to what we were asking. Though I have to admit, Ricoh and HP were the only ones to offer us a solution for linen stock.


If I can impart one other piece of advice to shoppers out there, it would be this: Every machine is going to have it's share of problems. Your best defense against that is a good service team. Make sure that whomever you're buying the printer from has a good number of technicians in your area trained on your model of printer. Make sure they also have a good number of printers in your area. And go visit one of those machines in the field (not just the showroom) and ask questions of the proprietor using the machine.

Anyway, I hope that any of this information might be useful to prospective buyers out there.
 
Just for giggles. If you are looking at the KM7000, save yourself some money and get the 6000. The engine is the same and the 7000 only prints 3 pages per minute faster on 12x18 cover weights.
 
The KM C7000 and C6000 are discontinued and replaced by the C1070 and C1060, which claim improved performance on linen and textured stocks.
 
Yeah, I found that out when we got our demo information today. The problem is that there are no C1070 or C1060's anywhere near us, which means there are no service techs regularly working on the machines near us. Past experience has taught me that is a red flag.
 
Here's a bit of a follow up.

We test-drove a KM Bizhub C8000 at a customer site. It was a damn fine machine. We were quoted 4.7 cents per click and $2100 per month for the lease. It did a bang up job on Linen stock. However, it appeared to suffer a bit on color matching. Blacks looked a little blue, and it had some slight mottling on the linen. The sales team was super responsive. The customer they hooked us up with was friendly, knowledgable, and most important a pretty good match for the kinds of printing we're doing.

We also did an on-site test at a customer site of the Ricoh 901. Unfortunately that customer didn't match us at all. However, the rep we met with was able to make some minor adjustments to the settings and printed linen beautifully. Dark blacks. No mottling.

We had a really hard time deciding between KM and Ricoh. Ultimately we decided to go with the Ricoh for the following reasons:

Most important: After doing a detailed analysis of the test prints, we found that both the color accuracy to the original image and the toner density was better on the Ricoh.

Second most important: After a brief discussion with the techs about both printers, the Ricoh seems slightly easier to self-service. We aren't going to be tearing the machine apart or anything, but we do want to be able to change out fusers, clean excess toner out of the machine, etc to get the highest quality prints possible. You could do all that on both machines, but the Ricoh appeared to be slightly easier to service.

Two nice perks:

a) The Ricoh was a 3 feet shorter than that KM. That's mostly because the KM has 3 extra drawers on it. And those 3 extra drawers were one of the reasons we really liked the KM. But in the end, since we decided to go with the Ricoh, having even that slight extra bit of floor space was a plus.

b) The Ricoh was 0.1 cents per click cheaper than the KM. In the greater scheme of things this will add up to virtually nothing. But if you're looking for perks, then that's a perk.

The Ricoh will be installed in a few weeks. So hopefully I'll be able to post a follow up here in a couple months stating that we made an excellent choice rather than the other way around.
 
We've been using the Ricoh now for several months, and couldn't be happier. Both the service and the machine have been performing at or perhaps even slightly above our expectations. Hopefully that trend will continue and we'll replace our Canon with a second Ricoh.
 
Thanks for the review.

Are you sure Ricoh c901 GA+ can print textured stock? Mine couldn't even print a slightly rougher uncoated paper. Send me private message if you want to chat more.
 
If the issue is poor fill you can improve the fill by creating a custom paper and setting the paper transfer current to a higher number (it's under advanced settings). If it's at -70 try -55 and see if it improves. Also having higher humidity helps too.
 
You know that usually means a phone call to tell you when they can make it.
lol, yup, and what does the "guarantee" even mean. Do you get a refund if they don't? We had a service contract that said "guarantee", but meant nothing.

As for buying a press, I'd recommend that anyone in the process bring their actual paper to a demo. I had a boss buy a machine for mailing. She went to look at a demo and it printed variable data really well and fast on the #10 envelopes while collating and stuffing. Turns out, the envelopes they used were more expensive than what we were using at the time and our #10s printed poorly and jammed too much. We lost the main client for that machine when we raised their prices for the better envelopes.

Same boss was told that a digital press could print on a variety of substrates really well including plastic and foil. It did at the demo, but we used different paper and it did not print well for us.

I had a different boss buy a press that saved money on clicks if you went EPM (I think that's what it was called, where it only printed CMY and simulated black). Turns out CMY-only didn't print well on our substrates.

Lastly, if you're the decision maker, but not the person running the press, maybe bring your people with you and have them run real jobs from your real clients.
 

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